Increment (++) and decrement (--) strings in Perl

Question

With perl -e \'$string=\"a\";print ++$string;\' we get b,
but with perl -e \'$string=\"b\";print --$string;\' we get -1

Answer 1

There are at least three reasons:

1. because there isn't any great need for it
2. the magic of auto-incrementing has been seen to be faulty, and there is no reason implement auto-decrementing in the same faulty way
3. the magic of auto-incrementing cannot be fixed because p5p doesn't like to break backwards compatibility

Raku (née Perl 6) on the other hand does not suffer from a need for backwards compatibility, and therefore has better behavior for auto-incrementing strings and has auto-decrementing as well. The ++ and -- operators work by calling the succ and pred methods on the object they are operating on.